The Art of Readable Code: Simple and Practical Techniques for Writing Better Code
By Dustin Boswell and Trevor Foucher
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About this ebook
As programmers, we’ve all seen source code that’s so ugly and buggy it makes our brain ache. Over the past five years, authors Dustin Boswell and Trevor Foucher have analyzed hundreds of examples of "bad code" (much of it their own) to determine why they’re bad and how they could be improved. Their conclusion? You need to write code that minimizes the time it would take someone else to understand it—even if that someone else is you.
This book focuses on basic principles and practical techniques you can apply every time you write code. Using easy-to-digest code examples from different languages, each chapter dives into a different aspect of coding, and demonstrates how you can make your code easy to understand.
- Simplify naming, commenting, and formatting with tips that apply to every line of code
- Refine your program’s loops, logic, and variables to reduce complexity and confusion
- Attack problems at the function level, such as reorganizing blocks of code to do one task at a time
- Write effective test code that is thorough and concise—as well as readable
"Being aware of how the code you create affects those who look at it later is an important part of developing software. The authors did a great job in taking you through the different aspects of this challenge, explaining the details with instructive examples."
—Michael Hunger, passionate Software Developer
Dustin Boswell
Although raised in the circus, Dustin Boswell realized early on that he was better at computers than at acrobatics. Dustin received his B.S. from CalTech, where he got hooked on Computer Science, and then went to UC San Diego for his Master's Degree. He worked at Google for five years, on a variety of projects including web crawling infrastructure. Dustin is now an internet startup junkie who spends his free time hiking the Santa Monica mountains and being a new dad.
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Reviews for The Art of Readable Code
1 rating1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I took this book to help me establish important habits of writing code. I would recommend this to anyone whose daily work involves programming or software development.
Let me try to summarize in few paragraphs:
The fundamental theorem of code is that it is code written must be easier to understand.
To make surface level improvements in our code, we want to define variables, functions with precise words, information packed comments and formatting in such a way that readability is easy.
We want to make sure to pack enough information to be clear, precise in naming variables i.e. Kill(), Pause() instead of Stop(). At times, other programmers might misconstrue names from our programs, we want to make sure we think of other programmers and how they would interpret our code.
Comments are invaluable and should be used only when it helps in understanding the code better. We follow standard left to right value variable while using control flow and minimize as much as possible for using deep nested loops. In case of complex expressions or giant expressions, as much as we can minimize mental stack for other programmers, it is easier to maintain, code is less likely to create bugs.
As much as possible, the essential functions can be implemented from pertinent programming library so that we write less code. Each function needs to contain one task at a time and organize as much modules, functions as possible.
I have a summary of entire book, if you do want it, PM me.
Deus Vult,
Gottfried